“Relations Between Thoughts - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

“Relations Between Thoughts
and Hands”1
Expressive Themes of African Arts

Allen F. Roberts

After fifty years of uninterrupted publication,

African Arts is venerable by any measure.
Given how sadly shorter-lived most human-
ities journals have proven, that African Arts
remains relevant to sharp-edged creativity
across and about the continent is all the more
remarkable. An argument can be made that African Arts has been
progressive from its inception, insofar as Eurocentric notions of
what constitutes “art” have been challenged through in-depth,
archival, and feet-on-the-ground research of local aesthetics (e.g.
Thompson 1973, Abiodun 1994), bringing voices and choices of
African interlocutors to the fore. Even the “s” of African Arts—
the plural, that is—is provocative, for it challenges any sense that
African “art” as a collective noun is to be understood of a piece, O
that artworks are only “high” and thus worthy of consideration if
confined to the sculptures that first caught European eyes, influ-
enced early European Modernists so famously, and currently
sell at auction for astronomical sums. Invece, as Herbert Cole
(1969) presciently encouraged us to consider in an early issue
of African Arts, if art is understood as a verb as well as a noun,
emphasis may be placed upon processes rather than solely given
to final forms, helping us to grasp the ever-changing reasons
why and how artists create what they do (Fig. 1). In other words,
we may consider philosophies and methods of making, Piuttosto
than admiring formal qualities of art objects as the end-all of
scholarship.2 The “s” of “Arts” further recognizes the astonishing
multiplicity of perspectives across the continent’s fifty-five states
(including the disputed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic); its

Allen F. Roberts is Professor of World Arts and Cultures and (affil-
iated) Professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. He has
served as a co-editor of African Arts since 1999, and he conducts re-
search, writes, organizes museum exhibitions, and sometimes co-teach-
es about African humanities with Mary “Polly” Nooter Roberts. His
most recent book, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial
Hegemony in the Congo (2013), won ACASA’s Outstanding Publica-
tion Award of 2011–2013 and was a finalist for the 2013 Herskovits
Prize of the African Studies Association. aroberts@arts.ucla.edu

32 | african arts SPRING 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 1

more than 2000 ethnicities, languages, and religions; its long and
shorter histories, including those of various colonial moments;
and its profusion of intellectual and artistic achievements over
the millennia and up to this very second.

Many expressive themes have been addressed in African Arts,
from “traditional” ritual arts to “contemporary” theatrical per-
formances.3 Before considering some of these, let us ponder the
quotation marks of this last sentence, for among the theoretical
and ideological issues long debated in the journal’s pages, dis-
tinct issue has been taken with spurious notions of stasis all too
readily associated with “tradition,” as though African peoples are
somehow timeless and without long and complex exchanges of
ideas and practices within the continent and across the waters.4
Allo stesso modo, from the very first issue of African Arts, the question
has been raised as to whether expression can ever be anything
but “contemporary.” What points of reference are appropriately
considered with regard to this latter term of such evident tem-
poral relativity? Surely not Europe alone or even primarily, even
though sub-Saharan African histories have been closely bound to
those of Europe for well over 500 years now, and those of north-
ern Africa and the Horn for far longer than that. Just as surely,
“contemporary” must refer to senses of self and circumstance
held and most probably debated by all human communities and
their various members at every moment of time. The point to
be made here is that positions of “conventional wisdom” about
African peoples and their arts have been questioned from the
journal’s beginnings.

The first issues of African Arts present the panoply of expressive
themes that have characterized the journal for the last half cen-
tury. Reflective yet theoretically stimulating pieces by Léopold
Sédar Senghor and Albert Memmi (both 1967) introduced
African Arts to the world. President Senghor’s important contri-
bution is published in English for the first time in the present
issue of African Arts, introduced and translated by Brian Quinn.
Albert Memmi offered an allegorical prose poem about the great
ambivalences of his own existence as an “Arab Jew” of Tunisia,
thus positing mimetic perplexities similar to those developed in
his landmark polemic The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965).5

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1 Herbert Cole’s “Art as a Verb in Iboland” (Cole
1969); the caption of this illustration reads, “One
spirit worker (right) sings and dances praise to the
unpainted ﬁgure of Ala, while others look on. From
time to time workers spontaneously begin to dance
or sing or both.”

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The gauntlet was thrown: Difficult questions about life in early
postcolonial Africa would not be ignored in the journal’s pages,
and instead, they would be among the publication’s primary rai-
sons d’être, as they remain today.

Literary criticism, original poetry, and fiction were early fea-
tures of the journal. For example, Albert Gérard provided an
overview of literature from Cabo Verde, still a Portuguese col-
ony in 1968 but independent after 1975. The presentation of
“an impressive body of imaginative writing” in Portuguese and
Crioulo, often inflected by saudade—plaintive distress from the
difficult circumstances of life in a small archipelago whence Cabo
Verdeans were and are longing for better elsewheres (Gérard
1968:62–63)—was engaging and instructive unto itself. Yet
Gérard’s piece also bespeaks two important features of African
Arts: attention to less-familiar communities of the continent and
recognition of how significant Lusophone and Creole forms of
expression have been and are to African histories of “thoughts
and hands.”6

Senegalese literary critic Mohamadou Kane (1968) presented
a caveat in his contribution to the first volume of African Arts,
Tuttavia, urging that expatriate writers verse themselves in the
languages and cultures of the African authors whose works they
would discuss. While such an assertion may seem self-evident in
2017, it was progressive indeed so few years after independence
was won by most African states in the early 1960s and notewor-
thy that African scholars such as Kane should choose the pages

of African Arts to make such potent declarations.

In a similarly provocative manner, Dorothea Gallup (1968)
discussed how violence was a theme of Francophone Algerian
novels written during the convulsive years 1950–1962. In so
doing, not only did she bring attention to how the arts contrib-
ute to understanding and, one can hope, resolution of fraught
political circumstances, she also set in train an ongoing sensitiv-
ity to such courageous productions in the pages of African Arts.
That similar positions remain integral to the journal is evident
in a special issue on “trauma and representation in Africa” orga-
nized by Kim Miller and Shannen Hill in 2005, which featured
pieces on artistic reactions to the bombing of the US Embassy
in Nairobi (Kasfir 2005; Fig. 2) and to the Rwandan genocide of
1994 (Mirzoeff 2005).

Two moving works in the first issue of African Arts, a poem
by “Ghana’s most interesting younger poet” George Awoonor-
Williams and a short story by the Nigerian novelist John
Munonye, introduced these idioms to many readers. More affect-
ing writing would come, such as “Of Silence, of Noise” by the
celebrated Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah (1972), even if formal
interest in fiction would soon be ceded to more evidently liter-
ary publications. Notably, Munonye’s piece was illustrated with
drawings by Ibrahim el-Salahi, then professor at the School of
Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum. The cross-regional nature of
the decision to illustrate Nigerian writing with Sudanese draw-
ings should be recognized as progressive indeed.7

VOL. 50, NO. 1 SPRING 2017 african arts | 33

2 A special issue on “Trauma and Representation”
included Sidney Kasﬁr’s article on reactions to the
US embassy in Nairobi (Kasﬁr 2005). The caption
reads:
“Martin Kamuyu
Heartbook (1999)
Oils
Collection of Sidney Kasﬁr”

3 The ﬁrst issue of African Arts included a color
portfolio of paintings by Ibrahim el-Salahi. IL
caption reads:
“The Last Sound Prayer”

entrepreneurial activities of contemporary Christian artists of
Ethiopia by Neal Sobania and Raymond Silverman (2009; Fig. 5).
Interestingly enough, in a provocative “Letter from London”
by Dennis Deurden in the journal’s same first issue, el-Salahi’s
work was discussed in the context of a London exhibition of
works by contemporary artists Skunder Boghossian of Ethiopia
and Twins Seven Seven of Nigeria, among others.10 Following
what Deurden called the “cultural ethnocentrism” of Europeans
“who regard[ed] Africa as their lost Arcadia” and who longed
for the sorts of “naked, direct communication” they perceived
as yet possible on the continent, unnamed London critics found
el-Salahi “too much like an artist in Paris or New York,” with
the further “faint suggestion” that as an African, he was “inev-
itably doomed to become a poor example of the latter,” even as
he had become insufficiently “African” to suit the tastes of some
(Duerden 1967:29, 67). Contestations of the sort are still the stuff
of postcolonial debate (per esempio., Chakrabarty 2007), and clearly, come
controversy has been welcome in the pages of African Arts from
the start. In el Sahali’s case, it is a joy to see that his work continues

El-Salahi’s first color portfolio appeared in the same issue
of African Arts, following exhibition of his paintings at New
York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1965 (Fig. 3). As he explained,
“through the abstracted rhythmic shapes of calligraphy,” he was

led to visualize the presence of objects, the human figure, and a
whole world of imagery.” He further asserted that “Islamic schol-
ars say there is nothing at all to restrict you from reproducing
the human image as you want. In a way it’s a kind of prayer too,
because you are appreciating God’s creations and trying to think
about them and meditate on His creativity” (el-Salahi 1967:21, 26).

In so doing, el-Salahi averred that he discovered himself through
his work.8

That a Muslim contemporary artist from the Sudan should be
featured so prominently in the first issue of African Arts is sig-
nificant in its recognition of complexities of African life that are
still very much with us fifty years later, including the fact that
while Islam has been a religion of Africa since the days of the
Prophet nearly fourteen hundred years ago, some assume that it
is a faith foreign to the continent.9 Countering any such sense, UN
wide variety of arts of Islam in Africa have been written about in
the journal, including a signal introduction to the architecture
of Islam in West Africa by Labelle Prussin (1968; Fig. 4), a dis-
cussion of Muslim masquerade in western Burkina Faso by René
Bravmann (1977), and an engaging photo essay on “Sufi Sheikhs,
Sheikhas, and Saints of the Sudan” by Frédérique Cifuentes
(2008). Christianity is as African as Islam, Ovviamente, and as one
would expect, Christian arts of Africa have also received exten-
sive attention in African Arts; witness recent pieces on early visual
and performance arts of Kongo kingdoms by Cécile Fromont
(2011) and Geoffroy Heimlich (2016), and on the creativity and
34 | african arts SPRING 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 1

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4 Labelle Prussin’s article on West Af-
rican Islamic architecture (Prussin 1968)
was one of many articles addressing
the wide variety of African Islamic arts.
The caption reads, “Sankore mosque at
Timbucktoo.”.

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to be recognized, as in an exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2013.
Infatti, he is the first African artist to be accorded a retrospec-
tive at that hallowed institution, as celebrated in African Arts by
another visionary African Modernist, the Ghanaian painter Atta
Kwami (2014).11

Theater found a place in the first issues as well, with an illu-
minating piece by Jean Decock (1967) discussing two plays by
the great Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, La Tragédie du Roi
Christophe about the king of Haiti, and Saison au Congo con-
cerning the assassination of Patrice Lubumba. In an article two
issues later, Decock (1968) discussed staged productions of what
was then called the National Folk Troupe of Mali, suggesting
that such spectacles blur distinctions between ritual and theater.
In so doing, he foreshadowed many thoughtful contributions
to African Arts, such as Polly Richards’s “Masques Dogons in a
Changing World” (2005; Fig. 6), as well as conversations of the
early 1980s between Victor Turner, as a scholar of African ritual,
and Richard Schechner, as a director of avant-garde theater, Quello
would lead to foundation of Performance Studies as a discipline.12
Such progressive approaches to contemporary writing have
long been balanced by writers’ consideration of oral narrative as

a more “traditional” mode of expression, as exemplified by an
early article by Elie Ekogamve (1969) on the praise poems of Fang
people of Cameroon, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea (then still
the Spanish colony of Rio Muni). A brief piece by Daniel Ben-
Amos (1967) recounts collective presentation of tales that “are
both history and art” in the Nigerian Kingdom of Benin, stress-
ing the significance of women’s participation in such storytelling.
Later contributions have explored other aspects of African folk-
lore, such as Donald Cosentino’s 1980 study of a particular
storyteller in Sierra Leone named Lele Gbomba, whose style he
termed “Mende Baroque.” In this same piece, Cosentino brought
attention to humor, both as enjoyed by Gbomba’s audiences and
by readers of African Arts through Cosentino’s rollicking writ-
ing. His “Mende Ribaldry” of 1982 signaled a no-holds-barred
approach to profoundly grounded yet startling presentation of
lived realities that would carry Cosentino—and his many fans—
through presentations of Haitian Vodou (per esempio., Cosentino 1988)
that remain gripping, insightful and, often enough, hilarious.

While both theater and oral narratives have received endur-
ing if intermittent attention in African Arts, music, dance, E
related performance arts, also discussed in first issues, Avere

VOL. 50, NO. 1 SPRING 2017 african arts | 35

5 The entrepreneurial activities of Ethiopian Christian artists
were discussed in an article by Neal Sobania and Raymond
Silverman (2009). The caption reads, “Hailemariam Zerue
explaining the qualities of an icon he considers particularly
ﬁne. 2001."

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received increasing coverage, as witnessed by a recent piece by
Robert Bellinger on “The Géwël Tradition Project” (2013), Di
praise-singing in Senegal and adjacent countries. Such expres-
sive scenes were set by Lois Anderson’s survey of “the African
xylophone,” with specific attention to Uganda and adjacent east-
ern Africa. One can assume that the article has been useful to
undergraduate teaching, given the engaging ethnographic details
Anderson provided about an instrument and its music that may
seem well known yet differ so remarkably from place to place—as
when wooden keys were affixed to resonating banana trunks and
played by as many as six musicians at the Buganda royal court,
producing compelling rhythms conveyed over great distances
(1967:47). It is worth underscoring that teaching was an explicit
purpose of the founding of African Arts in the 1960s, given the
dearth of attention to African humanities in college textbooks
then as now.13

The pedagogical potential of African Arts is further illustrated
by an exceptional piece in the second issue by David Ames (1968)
comparing musicians and musical practices among Igbo and
Hausa peoples of Nigeria. During Ames’s fieldwork, the small
cluster of rural Igbo hamlets known as Obimo reflected precepts
and everyday activities of subsistence farming in an “egalitarian,"
“individualistic” society. Music accompanied many different cir-
circostanze, from sacred rituals to leisure-time recreation, Ma
while expertise was appreciated, there were no professional musi-
cians. In contrast, Hausa society was strictly stratified, E
musicians and a number of other professionals were not well
regarded by elites, even though their praise-singing was widely

sought. Ames was well ahead of his time in his nuanced study
matching a keen eye for cultural dynamism with broader societal
comparison. Breakthrough work of this sort has made African Arts
a platform for development of fields like Ethnomusicology, still in
its infancy in the late 1960s when the journal first appeared.14

Also of note in the Ames article are the brilliant color illustra-
tions that have remained a hallmark of African Arts throughout
its half century of publication.15 One dramatically composed pho-
tograph (Fig. 7) shows two heralds playing meters-long trumpets
before the ornate façade of the Emir of Zaria’s palace, one blow-
ing “a traditional trumpet made of brass, the other an instrument
made of kerosene tins” (Ames 1968:40). This tiny detail, so easily
passed over, nonetheless suggests that updated expressive prac-
tices have been studied by hundreds of the journal’s contributing
authors over all these years (per esempio., Seriff 1996). Brass creatively
replaced by recycled tin is incorporated into Ames’s presentation
as though such updating of material culture is to be expected and
celebrated rather than decried, as Eurocentric romanticists might
in pursuit of an “Arcadian Africa,” following Dennis Deurden’s
(1967) reasoning mentioned above.

Dance and related performance idioms were understood to
be of fundamental importance to any presentation of African
arts, whether in “traditional” or “contemporary” circumstances.
In the journal’s third issue, for instance, anthropologist Hilda
Kuper evocatively discussed movement practices in Swaziland,
southern Africa. Every year at the summer solstice, Incwala cel-
ebrates kingship as associated with “fertility, authority, and order
in the universe.” As “the Bull, the Lion, the Inexplicable, the Great

36 | african arts SPRING 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 1

6 Polly Richards (2005) is one of many authors to
address the blurring of distinctions between ritual and
theater in African art. The caption reads, “Mask dance
requested by tourists in Sangha, (Dogon region), 1996.
Photo: P. Richards.”

7 David Ames’s 1969 article on musicians and musical
practices among Igbo and Hausa peoples included the
kind of dramatic color photography that has become
a hallmark of the journal. The caption reads, “Two of
the Emir’s trumpet players (masu Kakari) in front of the
Emir’s palace in the old city of Zaria. One is playing the
kakari, a traditional trumpet made of brass, the other an
instrument made of kerosene tins.”

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VOL. 50, NO. 1 SPRING 2017 african arts | 37

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8 The journal’s ﬁrst issue in-
cluded an article by Peggy Harper
(1967) that referenced staged
performances for urbane, multi-
cultural audiences. The caption
reads, “Dramatic use of dance in
a production of Wole Soyinka’s
play, The Lion and the Jewel,
staged in the Arts Theatre of the
University of Ibadan. Photograph
by Francis Speed.”

Mountain,” the Swazi king “performs an inspired solo” dance to
empower the moment (Kuper 1968:58).16 As significant as such
artistry may be to social harmony, Tuttavia, Kuper suggested that
“body movement … is a particularly suggestive symbol for evok-
ing mixed reactions,” for “dance is an approved public declaration
of a specific identity,” and indeed, “the dance is made by the per-
figlio, but the person is in turn made by the dance” (1968:57). IL
political and reflexive implications of Kuper’s thoughts foreshadow
elements of dance theories of our own days (per esempio., Lepecki 2016).

“Dance in a changing society” was a topic engaged by Peggy
Harper in the journal’s first issue, with primary reference to her
own work as a choreographer then directing the School of Dance
in the Drama Department at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
As yet another African Arts author ahead of her time, Harper
began with a discussion of dance criticism and how “the audi-
ence-performer relationship” differs “in ethnic and theatrical
dance situations,” with this latter referring to staged performances
for urbane, multicultural audiences before which works by Wole

Soyinka and other local playwrights were performed by profes-
sional actors and dancers (Fig. 8). In a related vein, Judith and
William Hanna explained how performances at the Expo ’67
World’s Fair in Montreal by “Heart Beat of Uganda,” a national
troupe of dancers and musicians, were meant to “enhance …
national pride and unity” by “trying to forge a ‘traditionalized’
national identity” presented to a global audience (1968:42). IL
tensions of continuity and change were performed as well, COME
they are by various African national ballets in our own days (Vedere
Kringelbach 2008). Finalmente, Harper’s approach to “dance in a
changing society” is echoed in the self-conscious performances of
South African choreographer Gregory Maqoma (2011; Fig. 9), O
the activism of the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula
with whom Maqoma sometimes collaborates, as Linyekula and
his colleagues seek to direct young people toward dance rather
than violence in the war-torn city of Kisangani (Dupray 2013).

Needless to say, many more expressive themes featured in
African Arts over the decades might be mentioned, such as

38 | african arts SPRING 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 1

women’s arts, which were implicit in early contributions that
mentioned women’s roles in artistic production but did not
focus upon them as a topic unto itself (per esempio., Davis 1974), E
then received more direct attention as culturally specific feminist
approaches became developed and applied (Kasfir 1998). Corpo
arts (per esempio., Klemm 2009), ceramics (Berns 1989), textiles and dress
(Daly, Eicher, and Erekosima 1986; Fig. 10), and contemporary
fashion (Loughran 2003) have also been covered extensively. Ma
what about film (Vieyra 1968), graffiti (Marschall 2008), cartoon-
ing and comics (Repetti 2007), colonial postcards (Prochaska
1991), and even philately (Posnansky 2004)? Consideration of
these and a host of other topics still leaves Loxodonta africana
in the room: What about sculpture? We may respond and close
this conversation with another question: Has there been an issue
of African Arts over the last half century that has not celebrated
such wonderful works?

9 African dance performance has been further
illuminated in articles by choreographers such as
Gregory Maqoma (2011). The caption reads, “Greg-
ory Maqoma performing Beautiful Us. Photo: John
Hogg.”

10 Articles on African textiles and dress have ﬁlled
an increasing place in the journal, as in this article
on Kalabari dress by Catherine Daly, Joanne B.
Eicher, and Tonye V. Erekosima (1986). The caption
reads, “Three Women Dressed as Iria Bos seated
with a women’s society.”

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VOL. 50, NO. 1 SPRING 2017 african arts | 39

Notes
Notes

From a statement by the poet-nationalist Léopold

Sédar Senghor, then President of the Republic of Sen-
egal, welcoming inauguration of African Arts (1967:6).
The piece was published in French, and a full English
translation is offered to readers for the first time by
Brian Quinn in the present issue of the journal.

For a most stimulating discussion of “making”

that is apposite for reflecting upon African artistic
production, see Stewart 2011.

3 The obvious should be stated: Two hundred issues

of African Arts have been published over the last fifty
years, offering well over 2500 articles and other scholarly
features to readers around the world; see Herbert Cole’s
2007 review of the first forty years. By no means do the
themes and authors mentioned in the present piece rep-
resent the totality or the “best” of all accomplishments
of and writers for the journal.

4 Pertinent retorts abound; Vedere, Per esempio,

Duerden 1967, Lamp 1996, and Sobania and Silverman
2009; yet unfortunate terms like “primitive” and “crude”
(brut in French) continue to be used in some circles. It
may be noted that although African Arts was called a
“magazine” in its early years, I refer to it in the present
article as a “journal” because of its consistent contribu-
tions to scholarship.

5 Memmi (1968) published a second provocative
piece in African Arts three issues later that was dedicated
to Senghor and that contrasted the latter savant’s sense
of Négritude with Memmi’s own of what he termed
Judéité. The piece was illustrated by a Janus mask of Ekoi
people of Nigeria from the UCLA Wellcome Collection
(now at the Fowler Museum), and one may note that
in translating the title as “The Negro and the Jew,” the
editors misconstrued the author’s dualistic ontological
intentions. If I may be permitted the conceit of a personal
anecdote regarding Memmi’s principal oeuvre, IL
Colonizer and the Colonized was among works in the
book locker I was provided as a Peace Corps Volunteer
in the Republic of Chad (1968–1970), and reading it in
tandem with its locker-mate, Prospero and Caliban: IL
Psychology of Colonization by Octave Mannoni (1956), set
the intellectual course of my career in African Studies. As
a further conceit, I dedicate the present paper to Polly and
her parents, Nancy and Robert Nooter, for whom African
arts have been a life-long joy.

6 Attention to less familiar places and artistic media

is exemplified by Doran Ross’s 1993 piece on Carnaval
masquerades of Guinea-Bissau, or Prita Meier’s of 2009
on display tactics along the Swahili Coast. Attention to
Lusophone Africa is manifest in Marie-Louise Bastin’s
several contributions on Angolan arts, such as her piece
on ritual masks of Chokwe peoples in 1984, as respect-
fully updated by Manuel Jordán in 2000. Initiatives
of the sort are ongoing, as the arts of many African com-
munities have yet to be presented in the pages of African
Arts, whereas all are welcome topics.

For more recent consideration of relationships

between verbal and visual arts, see Palmeirim 2008
on Aruwund/Lunda people of southwestern DRC and
northeastern Angola.

In the “First Word” of the first issue of African Arts,
it is explained that “the el-Salahi portfolio first took form
… when one of the editors met el-Salahi in Khartoum;
this chance encounter was an important stimulus to our
efforts to found this magazine” (Anon. 1967). See Steven
Nelson’s discussion of contemporary arts in African Arts
in the present issue. It may be noted that in the fifty years
since el-Salahi shared these thoughts, Wahhabi conser-
vatism has precluded depiction of humans by Sudanese
artists remaining in their native land, despite the reality
that el-Salahi expressed so clearly, that the Qu’ran does
not prohibit any such practice; see Naef 2004.

In 613 ce (sometimes understood as 615), IL

Prophet sent a small group of followers and members

40 | african arts SPRING 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 1

of his family into exile from their persecution in Mecca, The Musicians of Zaria and Obimo.” African Arts 1
The Musicians of Zaria and Obimo.” African Arts 1
of his family into exile from their persecution in Mecca,
(2):40–45, 80, 82–84.
in what is known as the First Flight or Hijrah (Hegira)
of Islam. They were received and protected by the
Christian king of Abyssinia, Negus Ashama of Axum.
Such histories are to be found on many online sites, e.g.
http://mercyprophet.org/mul/node/1023.

Anderson, Lois. 1967. “The African Xylophone.” African
Arts 1 (1):46–49, 66, 68–69.

Anonymous. 1967. “First Word.” African Arts 1 (1):1,
58–59.

10 The careers of these same artists have been traced

in the pages of African Arts, as in a review of Oshun,
a record by Twins Seven Seven who was a talented
musician as well as painter (Witmer 1982), and a mov-
ing tribute to the same artist offered by Henry Glassie
(2012). Skunder Boghossian’s work is contextualized by
Rebecca Nagy (2007) in a preview of the “Continuity
and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists”
exhibition organized by the University of Florida’s Harn
Museum.

11 El-Salahi’s more recent work is discussed by

Sarah Adams (2006), and the book Ibrahim El-Salahi:
A Visionary Modernist, edited by Salah Hassan and
written to accompany an exhibition of the same title
that was organized by the Museum for African Art in
New York that then traveled to the Tate in London,
is reviewed by W. Ian Bourland (2012). On Atta
Kwami’s modernist achievements, see Kristen Wind-
ermuller-Luna’s 2016 review of the artist’s monograph
Kumasi Realism, 1951–2007: An African Modernism
(Kwami 2013).

12 Vedere, Per esempio, Turner’s From Ritual to Theater
(2001) and Schechner and Turner’s Between Theater and
Anthropology (1985).

13 As an example of the editors’ educational intent,
the anonymous author of the “First Word” to the first
issue of African Arts explained that “a colorful and
varied offering” would be presented to readers through
offset printing of color photographs, and choice of a
heavy paper stock would “insure better production of
illustrations and … preclude deterioration in tropic
climes” in hopes that the magazine would be widely
distributed to African readers via African university
libraries. Inoltre, a thousand extra sets of color
pages would also be created for use by schools in the
stati Uniti (1967:58).

14 Ethnomusicology has nineteenth-century roots
but is generally considered to have become an academic
discipline in 1960 when Dr. Mantle Hood created the
Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA as the first
degree-granting university program in the United
States (see https://www.ethnomusic.ucla.edu/histo-
ry-of-ethnomusicology-at-ucla). Ames was trained as
an anthropologist, and his comparative consideration
of “musical behavior” rather than the particularities of
musical composition and style appears to differ from
some directions of Ethnomusicology; Vedere, Per esempio,
Bruno Nettl’s criticism of the Ames article (1983:63),
in which analogy is nonetheless drawn to the similar
approach of Alan Lomax, who remains an avatar of the
discipline.

15 Herbert Cole (2007:1) reported that “19,565 pho-

tographs (including objects in advertisements)” were
published during the first forty years of African Arts.

16 Incwala is still understood as “Swaziland’s most
important cultural event …. that has lasted for hundreds
of years”; see http://www.thekingdomofswaziland.com/
pages/content/index.asp?PageID=55.

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